Entrepreneurs and charities came together to look at ways the city’s business community can help the growing homeless population.

Hosted by Allia at its Norfolk Street base, which has just been rebranded as Future Business Centre Cambridge Central, the weekend event saw groups work together to develop ideas with the help of the Allia team and representatives of charities Emmaus and Wintercomfort.

Allia's homelessness challenge saw entrepreneurs and charities get together to look for solutions

Suggestions that emerged included ‘Must Eat’ and coffee voucher schemes which could be bought from retailers and exchanged for food and hot and cold drinks, to pop up events for homeless women which could enable them to feel fresh and clean by providing access to hairdressers, sanitary products and dentists. Allia’s Serious Impact accelerator programme will now support some of these initiatives to testing and implementation stage.

Neil Prem, Allia’s head of enterprise engagement said: “We are delighted to bring our Norfolk Street space under the Future Business Centre umbrella and having this dedicated space to explore community issues.

“We had so many people involved in this first challenge to tackle some of the problems faced by homeless people – watch this space to see some of their exciting ideas being trialled in the city over the next few months.”

Allia's homelessness challenge saw entrepreneurs and charities get together to look for solutions

One of the attendees was Jacob Lewis, a second year law student at University of Cambridge who found himself homeless during his final school years.

He said: “Having lived with other homeless people and been helped by them it makes me want to do something to help. If we can take care of people’s most basic needs it really does make dealing with everything else so much easier.”

“We received an exceptionally high number of applicants for the last accelerator, and ended up running two cohorts simultaneously. The quality of ventures, and passion of entrepreneurs in and around Cambridge is fantastic, and I can’t wait to see what the next group will bring,” said Andrew Hatcher, business adviser for Serious Impact.